Generally, wireless/mobile devices include a user interface, such as a micro-browser, pre-installed on a wireless/mobile device and a set of fixed applications and hierarchical menus for Internet access. Using the micro-browser, a user browses the Internet using the fixed menus or by manually entering specific uniform resource locators (URLs).
Most wireless/mobile devices have inadequate processing capability for retrieving information, such as applications or data, and very limited memory space for caching such information. Thus, downloading applications or data from the Internet onto a mobile device may be very slow and sometimes unsuccessful. One possible solution to circumvent the need to repeatedly download from the Internet is to cache applications and data on the mobile device. Because mobile devices have very limited memory space, an intelligent caching of the most likely to be called applications or data is necessary to optimize this solution. Moreover, due to size and other limitations in mobile devices, efficient management of the cache space is necessary to ensure that application and data stored in the cache are up-to-date and useful to users.
Thus, it is desirable to provide apparatus and methods for managing caches on a mobile device.